MIT in a Year
How to make the most of a brief MIT experience
Nine months. The length of a human pregnancy. Also the length of my time at MIT. To clarify, this is not a story about pregnancy. Ask most MIT graduate students how long they plan to be here, and two years is the minimum. Many will be here well beyond four as they pursue a PhD. […]
How to Pass a Harvard Class
What it’s like to be a cross-registered student
Shopping Day is like speed dating for courses at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Herds of students filter in and out of classrooms. Nervous chatter splinters out across the students until the professor sweeps in and quiets the crowd. There I sat in a room, staring people in the eye that I had seen […]
Back to Square One
Learning to appreciate family
I just came back from Shanghai a week ago. It was my first trip home since I came to MIT in the summer of 2017. It’s been over a year and a half. I saw a lot of friends and family on this trip, including my high school math teacher. He told me the story […]
Ways of Responding to Accusations of Intelligence
Use in case of emergency
An awkward yet common situation that I’ve witnessed at MIT is one in which someone is accused of being intelligent. While grateful for such charitable perceptions, the accused is often left speechless, befuddled or even reflexively defensive. This post is not about how I feel about said accusations, the veracity of such claims, or my […]
Wasting My Degree
Why is having kids, moving out of the city, and following an unusual path a waste?
“She’s worried you’ll waste your degree.” My friend (let’s call her Anna) relays this message to me as coming from another friend, but I can tell from her tone of voice that she’s clearly worrying about the same potential waste. That makes the question doubly irritating. As if pretending to be merely the messenger could […]
